Siggraph convention visualizes the future

Shingo Yamano of University of Electro-Communications, Japan, left, and Ariana Alexander of Arizona State University demonstrate to Gerardo Medina of Mexico City, right, the AquaTop Display, a projection system by the University of Electro-Communications where users can immerse their hands in white water to interact with a computer's graphical user interface projected as a screen on the water, part of the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center.STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER

Inside a quiet chamber at the Anaheim Convention Center, a bald face – call him Ira – smiles through what looks like a window frame. As huddled researchers watch and whisper, Ira's mouth moves but the sound isn't on. That's OK; the scientists are less interested in what Ira is saying than what he may portend.

Ira is the latest in lifelike animation, a super-realistic computer model produced in partnership with video game giant Activision. He's on display this week at the Siggraph computer graphics convention, along with other technical advances that will find their way into video games, movies and new forms of interactive entertainment in coming years.

Thanks to 70 tiny projectors lined up in a semicircle all pointed at the same display surface, Ira's head comes to life in three dimensions, without the need for anyone in the crowd to wear glasses. A visitor can move right to left or left to right in front of Ira's smiling, talking head and see him from dozens of angles.

USC researcher Ari Shapiro is the real-life model for Ira. He sat in a dome surrounded by lights and cameras for about an hour in January. The session captured the look of his face from every angle and detail, down to the pores on his cheeks, while Shapiro worked through a set of emotions – surprise, sadness, happiness, etc.

The resulting digital representation is so realistic that acquaintances in the industry recognize Shapiro up on viewing the demo online and then, hearing his voice, lose all doubt. Researchers reversed the letters of his double's first name so that Ari Shapiro would stop hearing about what his colleagues are doing to "him" every day.

"As soon as it was called Digital Ira, I was at peace with it," Shapiro said. "It's not quite me, but it's enough for it to hit home."

Siggraph, one of the world's largest and oldest conferences and exhibitions dedicated to computer graphics innovation, is attended by movie studios like Disney and computer graphics giants like NVIDIA. Nearly a third of the companies exhibiting are from California. Last year in Los Angeles, 21,000 people attended; organizers expect similar numbers in Anaheim.

Siggraph also draws university researchers such as Shapiro. One of the projects he works on animates virtual figures using nothing more than the sounds of a person's voice on an audio track. That could be useful if you need to create the feeling that two people are talking to each other in a video game or in virtual reality, with no more information available than their voices.

Digital Ira, meanwhile, could work his way into video games, introducing a new level of realism to the performances of virtual characters.

"This is quite possibly going to significantly change how we perceive interactive entertainment," said Paul Debevec, director of the ICT Graphics lab at USC that birthed Ira. "The level you can read emotions off the character is going to be much higher."

Movies like "Avatar" and "The Hobbit" deliver photo-realistic characters with underlying human performances to convey deep emotions. But interactive experiences such as video games have been playing catch up. Games with involved stories tend to use cut scenes, which are pre-designed computer generated graphics that are out of place in an interactive medium. Instead of "playing" the game, you end up watching mini-movies where, on a technical level, the emotion can be conveyed more easily.

Cut scenes are to video games what text titles were to silent films: a way of working around a technical limitation to tell a story.

Games like 2011's "L.A. Noire" are changing that, with actors offering motion-captured performances that end up conveying very subtle emotions without using a traditional cut scene. In "L.A. Noire," a player becomes a cop investigating crimes around a pulp 1940s Los Angeles. You interview suspects, victims and witnesses with eyes and ears laser focused on the slightest sound, twitch of a face or glance at the ceiling that might indicate a person is lying.

The team at USC is trying to push even further, with a face that captures lighting and subtleties. The problem is that the closer you try to re-create a human being digitally, the more unsettling it becomes to a viewer. It's an "uncanny valley" that will be bridged only when the digital face is so realistic that it doesn't set off alarm bells in our minds saying "this is wrong."

The valley is the always-present technical hurdle researchers and artists are trying to overcome, using ever more powerful computer systems.

"We're coming up the other side (of the valley) and we're close," said Debevec. "We're within striking distance."

Here's a look at three other technologies on display at Siggraph that provide hints at future entertainment experiences:

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Shingo Yamano of University of Electro-Communications, Japan, left, and Ariana Alexander of Arizona State University demonstrate to Gerardo Medina of Mexico City, right, the AquaTop Display, a projection system by the University of Electro-Communications where users can immerse their hands in white water to interact with a computer's graphical user interface projected as a screen on the water, part of the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Ari Shapiro, a USC researcher who just happened to give his face to a different project at USC called "Digital Ira," stands next to the digital re-creation of his face used for the project. It is also used with an autostereoscopic projector array optimized for 3-D facial display in the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013, a computer graphics and visualization conference at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Edward Grad, a matte painter who creates environments at Disney Animation in Burbank, walks through water columns by University of South Florida. The display sprays cold mist through the wooden sculpture that changes shape over the course of the day, part of Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Ari Shapiro, a USC researcher, is the face of "Digital Ira." Digital Ira is a super realistic face that can be rendered in real-time – the emotions that cross the face look ultra realistic and could make it into video games in the next few years. "Digital Ira" is part of the Siggraph 2013 computer graphics and visualization conference at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Heejeong Heo, a South Korea university student at Kaist, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, left, works the screen on one side of the display with Sixiao Tang, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Ellen Harrington from the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, using a TransWall, a two-sided touchable see-through display running software that requires the cooperation of users on both sides to perform some of the tasks with the floating blobs on the screen. The display at Siggraph 2013 is a project of Kaist. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Mike Torpey of Kia Design Center America in Irvine, back row left, leads a Photoshop class called "Sketching and Rapid Visualization (Tales From the Auto Industry)" during a Studio Workshop in the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013, a computer graphics and visualization conference at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Alice Lin of Mountain View, left, and Meiling Tan of New York, both employees of Google, check out Cloud Pink, an interactive touch sky screen by Seoul National University, hovering above the heads of visitors who wish to "play with the clouds above" during the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Yuji Sugimoto, a professor at Doshisha University in Japan, tries out a gesture-based interactive viewer by North Carolina State University that affects animated elements in ways that "increase awareness of our fragile and temporary relationship to our planet." The display is part of the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Guests take advantage of beanbag chairs set out in front of a display demonstrating Project Spark, a game maker for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Windows 8 used with Kinect and SmartGlass to build environments using rivers, mountains and towns. The station is part of the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
John Brothers, an engineering director at Samsung, stands on a rotating platform at the Wurm Hole One-Minute Portrait Sculptures exhibit by Arizona State University as he is scanned by a 3-D IR sensor moving along a 12-foot vertical arc. The data is then sent to a 3-D printer creating a one-minute portrait sculpture. The display is part of the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013 at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER
Mike Torpey of Kia Design Center America in Irvine leads a Photoshop class called "Sketching and Rapid Visualization (Tales From the Auto Industry)" during a Studio Workshop in the Emerging Technologies exhibit hall at Siggraph 2013, a computer graphics and visualization conference at the Anaheim Convention Center. STEVEN GEORGES, FOR THE REGISTER

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